The first thing that pops up when you Google “KUOW Joe Fain,” is the station’s headline from 2018.
“‘You raped me.’ Former Seattle official accuses Washington state Sen. Joe Fain of rape.”
Now he’s a candidate for KUOW’s board.
According to an email obtained by The Stranger, new KUOW CEO Tina Pamintuan wrote to staff last night, stating that station leadership only learned about Fain’s candidacy in “the past day” and is now in talks with the board’s governance committee.
The KUOW/Puget Sound Public Radio (PSPR) board recruits its own members and votes on a slate of candidates every September. KUOW staff do not vote, though Pamintuan is a non-voting member of the board and told staff she will be included in future discussions of each candidate.
“We will keep you updated as our conversations progress on this most recent slate of board candidates and former Sen. Fain’s candidacy.”
Andy McGovern, the KUOW/PSPR Board Chair wrote in an email to The Stranger that the next vote for board candidates will take place on September 18, 2025. He confirmed Fain is currently on the slate of candidates to be considered.
In 2018, KUOW reported on the allegations after Candace Faber, the city’s former “civic technology advocate,” an intermediary between Seattle and the tech industry, publicly accused Fain, a former Republican state senator, of rape. She told the station that he raped her when she was 23 years old, the night she graduated from Georgetown in 2007. She came forward after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford said it was her civic duty to tell the Senate, and the country, about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulting her.
Fain denied Faber’s allegations. He lost his reelection campaign that year, but lawmakers committed to continuing the investigation into the allegations, with a plan to complete it by the time his term ended. The investigation was suspended that December, after GOP legislators fought it.
Fain was later appointed by GOP leaders to serve on the state’s redistricting commission, at the same time as Brady Walkinshaw, the owner of Noisy Creek, The Stranger’s parent company. Fain’s appointment was met with anger. The National Women’s Political Caucus of Washington called on him to resign, as did state Democratic Chair Tina Podlodowski, Walkinshaw, and his fellow Democratic commission appointee, April Sims.
The commission was found to have violated the state’s Open Meetings Act. The commission settled after government transparency watchdogs sued. It agreed to pay $135,000 to cover the plaintiffs’ legal expenses and fees. Each member paid a $500 fine and received training on open meetings law.
Fain’s candidacy for the KUOW board comes up as his wife, Steffanie Fain, is running for a seat on the King County Council.
Faber told KUOW that she first met Fain while taking her parents on a tour of congressional buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Faber had come out as a lesbian in 2017, but was still wrestling with her sexuality at the time. At the graduation after-party, her father Matt Faber asked if she’d contacted that “nice young man.” She texted him an invite to the bar.
They kissed on the dance floor. But later, he was drunk enough that she had to hold him up, she said. He was much larger. She repeatedly asked him to leave, but he insisted she walk him to his hotel. He was too drunk to get there alone, he told her. Fain, struggling to walk, “draped” his body over hers on the way there. Faber told KUOW that she felt like she needed to “deposit” him in his hotel room before she went back to the party with her friends. When they got inside, he found his strength, she told KUOW.
“Suddenly, he wasn’t fucking weak anymore and he had no problem throwing me on the bed and ripping my dress off,” Faber told KUOW.
It was her favorite dress, she told KUOW. He broke the straps. From KUOW:
Faber became emotional in speaking about what she said happened next. She said Fain pushed her on the bed and started performing cunnilingus on her while she tried to push him away with her foot. Faber said Fain said this was “hot” while she said “no.” Faber said she repeatedly told Fain to stop, but that he stood up and asked if she had a condom. According to Faber, she said she didn’t, but he raped her anyway.
“I remember that that was when I just decided to look out the window,” Faber said.
Faber said she didn’t remember how that part of the night ended, but she said she did remember Fain later throwing up in the bathroom. He then asked her to pack for him, she said, because he was too sick. She said she did. Faber said she also agreed to FedEx Fain his lost jacket.
The next day, Faber asked her mother to mend the dress, but wouldn’t tell her how they’d been broken, or why later, she broke down and cried. Faber told her mother about the rape in 2009, but didn’t name Fain until 2016.
“When Trump got elected, she broke,” her mother Laura Lee Faber told KUOW. “The emotions just … so that’s when she told us his name.”
Faber also told her story to Julie Pham, the then vice president of community engagement and marketing at the Washington Technology Association, in 2016 and her friend, Sol Villarreal, the year prior. In 2012, she wrote about the experience and sent a draft to her former Georgetown professor in 2013. In 2017, while on medical leave of absence following a mental breakdown, Faber told colleagues at University of Washington’s Information School about the rape. She showed KUOW the emails, and one of her colleagues, Frank Martinez, confirmed that he’d received them. He said the first email shocked him, but he believed it to be credible.
Fain told The Stranger in an email that he was contacted about whether he’d be interested in the role, but has not been offered it (elections are not until the 18th).
“I have a strong desire to preserve public radio in our region, particularly as it comes under attack by a hostile administration in Washington, D.C. The board rightly has no influence or oversight of the news division, nor should it. As I understand it, the mission of the board is to further the viability of public media, which is a goal I share. At this time, I have only expressed my interest but have not been offered the role.”
Unfortunately Ms. Faber seems to have very little credibility. Almost any reasonable person, having just suffered a forcible rape, would report it to law enforcement immediately.
That Ms. Faber did not is quite revealing. That she says she was motivated by Blase Ford is also a strong statement. Nearly everyone dealing honestly with that situation realizes Blase Ford lied on the stand in an effort to thwart Trump’s SCOTUS nomination.
I truly hope Ms. Faber was not raped. And if she was I hope she can find justice. But she’s got a deep credibility hole to climb out of. A legacy of believe all women.
‘The first thing that pops up when you Google “KUOW Joe Fain,” is the station’s headline from 2018.‘
Why go as far as Google? Use the Stranger’s search function:
“Faber says she doesn’t plan to press charges … because Faber doesn’t want to file a report…”
(https://www.thestranger.com/election-2018/2018/10/15/33775274/the-seattle-times-doubles-down-on-their-endorsement-of-joe-fain-following-rape-accusation)
“Fain denied Faber’s allegations. He lost his reelection campaign that year, but lawmakers committed to continuing the investigation into the allegations, with a plan to complete it by the time his term ended. The investigation was suspended that December, after GOP legislators fought it.”
Let’s look at that earlier story from the Stranger again, this time in more detail:
“However, it doesn’t look like there will be an investigation. Because the alleged incident took place 11 years ago and in the other Washington, and because Faber doesn’t want to file a report, officials don’t know who would have jurisdiction to investigate the claim.”
Once Fain lost re-election, and would soon leave office, whatever jurisdiction the WA State Senate might’ve had disappeared. No matter how many times Faber told the story to others, she consistently refused to file a police report (as, again, the Stranger itself had noted), so there were no legal grounds for investigating Fain.
(Note DC’s statute of limitations on rape was longer than 11 years, so the DC police could have investigated— if Faber had filed a report. The Stranger had implied the 11-year distance in time was an impediment to finding jurisdiction; it was not. Faber was.)
@1 Most women don’t report rape to the authorities, because they understand that even if they are taken seriously and a suspect is arrested and charged (a big “if” indeed, as this happens only in a small minority of cases), they will essentially become captive to the process and be forced to surrender intimate details of their lives and months, potentially years, of their time to the case. A formal rape accusation is a brave step to take, and those who do it deserve our presumptive belief and support, but I wouldn’t blame or shame anyone for deciding not to go that route.
@3: If she’d stayed quiet about it, and someone else had told revealed her story without her knowledge or consent, then your explanation might apply to her. But, as this very headline post describes, she told a lot of different persons, over a long period of time. (The only entity she wouldn’t tell was the DC police, apparently.) Then she went public with the story during an election season, when her target was running for re-election. However all of that happened, it looks a lot more like attempted revenge than a quest for justice.
Stories like hers also hurt the cause of jailing every rapist, every time. Every victim should go straight to the police, and while sooner is better, why tell at all if the ways of telling can produce no prosecution?
@4 Being a victim of a crime does not confer any obligation — legal, moral, or ethical — on the victim. While one could credibly argue that it would be ideal for society as a whole if every rape victim went “straight to the police,” I think I just explained fairly well why it’s frequently not in an individual’s best interest to do so. Rape isn’t like, say, theft or robbery, where filing a police report might (if you’re lucky) get you your stuff back. There’s no way to similarly “undo” a rape, and since convictions are statistically very rare, reporting it is a difficult and complicated personal decision. I applaud those who do so, certainly, but I don’t judge or dismiss those who don’t.
However, I should have been clearer that declining to involve the authorities does not mean that a victim must forever stay silent. When a rape victim with no prior record of false accusations speaks up publicly and tells an internally consistent, unchanging story that does not contradict any known facts (as, for instance, Christine Blasey Ford and E. Jean Carroll did), they’re entitled to the same presumptive credibility accorded to victim testimony in a criminal case.
@6 Evidently you don’t know what “presumptive belief” means. It leaves room for reasonable doubt and factual rebuttal. I would never claim that 100 percent of public rape accusations are truthful. But the vast majority are, not least because it’s a very risky thing to do (especially against someone like Trump, who has an army of supporters willing to harass and threaten violence against his accusers).
@7 That makes no sense whatsoever. What facts did Ford and Carroll contradict? I’m not aware of any, and in Carroll’s case neither was the jury.
@9 That’s a claim Trump made on social media but not in court, which is a very frequent practice of his. I don’t think it’s credible.
@5: “… declining to involve the authorities does not mean that a victim must forever stay silent.”
No, but repeatedly making an accusation of rape against an elected official during election season, demanding his current employer investigate him, all the while refusing to file a police report, means observers have reason to believe she wants something other than justice.
@11 Sure, she might have ulterior motives, but does that make it wrong? While I’ve never been sexually assaulted (thank God) I’ve been majorly cheated and stolen from a few times over the years by people I trusted but decided in each case that calling the cops or suing them wouldn’t be worth the hassle. Whether those decisions were wise or foolish, I own them and am content to leave those episodes in the past and not speak of them again. But if one of those people were to run for office or be nominated for a position of public trust, I might (depending on the person and the circumstances) feel obliged to come forward with what I know about them. It’s a bit cynical to reflexively impute a nefarious motive to anyone who decides, for whatever reason, that it’s finally time to speak up about a long-ago injustice — especially a rape victim who will get no conceivable benefit, only grief (and quite possibly violent retribution).
E. Jean Carrol is a mad woman. She said there was no penetration. At most there was a kiss and a touch on her fanny in that dressing room. She had a sex column for years, and she wanted the limelight. After she won her victory, she said to Rachel Maddow “let’s go on a shopping spree.”
I hope Donald sues her for every penny she can beg, borrow, or steal!
@13 Sues her for what, excessive celebration? That’s only illegal in the NFL.
@12: “It’s a bit cynical to reflexively impute a nefarious motive to anyone who decides, for whatever reason, that it’s finally time to speak up about a long-ago injustice…”
But when the person decides “to speak up…” in every forum EXCEPT the one which can carry some hefty penalties for lying, his or her audience can factor that refusal into their evaluation of that person’s decision to speak up.
“But if one of those people were to run for office or be nominated for a position of public trust, I might (depending on the person and the circumstances) feel obliged to come forward with what I know about them.”
And you would be asked, “if this was so important, why did you not pursue a remedy back then?” The person’s subsequent decisions cannot possibly alter the facts of your case. Now, if the person made statements you thought were false, then your coming forward after those statements would look less opportunistic. But by waiting, you leave yourself open to the possibility your audience might believe you acted out of an ulterior motive.